Finally, after months of delay we have “soft launched” our premium accounts. They are not fully functional yet, but we decided to take a leap and release them into the wild. They have replaced our old donation system. Don’t expect miracles if you sign up for a premium account (yet). There are some extra features like PDF cuesheet printing and better map printing, as well as access to our new Activity Center (a new way to manage your activities) however things remain a bit sparse. Within the next month we will release several new features such as an enhanced export for training purposes as well as direct write to Garmin Devices.

Additionally, anyone signing up for a premium account receives new features automatically. Phone support is also provided. If you are on the fence, feel free to wait a few weeks and see what we release!

Signup for a premium account!

With the recent release of IE9, I soon found out that users attempting to use Garmin Sync with IE9 were having trouble. We have implemented a fix, and everything seems to be working well now. Sorry for the hassle, but thanks for letting us know!

Motorcycle-USA integration launched!

We worked with Motorcycle USA a while back to develop an integration so their users could search for and check out routes within their site. They recently launched it, check it out if you’re interested: Motorcycle Ride Guide

New route planner and viewer

Currently we are working on a Javascript-based route planner and viewer. This means that there will no longer be anything in the way of our tools working on iPhones and iPads. The most significant impact will be that route editing will work great! This is the most important consideration in launching this work, because currently route editing is limited to fairly simple modifications. We want our route planning and viewing tools to be rock solid, bug free, and easy for us to extend and maintain. That is the goal with this work, and we are currently ahead of schedule and very happy with where this is going. Expect a new route planner and viewer before April.

Don’t worry – you will not have to learn something new. We believe that much of what we have done we have done right: elevation live updating and right there for you to see and interact with, easy and fast click-to-draw routes, and an interface that gets uses your browser window space as effectively as possible. The main impact you will see from this work once it is released are some performance improvements and added features, such as adding photos to your cuesheet entries and points of interest.

Beta continues with addition of Activity Center

Our beta is continuing and currently includes the printing of custom maps and cue sheets, and that recent addition of the Activity Center. We are going to be improving these features and working out the bugs as quickly as we can in order to get them out on our site for everyone to use.

Final thoughts

We have been working incredibly hard and will continue to do so… now at an accelerated pace. Please let us know if you have any concerns or questions. I wrote this quick post up because someone just reminded me that our blog has not been updated in a while – any feedback is appreciated and does have an impact!

Garmin Connect just recently moved to Bing based maps, and spurred a huge outcry from their userbase. The topic on Garmin’s forum has racked up a total of twelve pages today alone with many negative comments, including many people talking about how they will be moving on to other sites. Zack and I just want to say welcome to any Garmin Connect users looking for an innovative, customer centric free website dedicated to being the best way to log bike rides

Please, feel free to signup and give some suggestions for us. We love talking with our users and are happy to have you on our service!

This isn’t directly Ride With GPS related, however I thought this calorie tracking website was a cool idea:

http://janeme.com

We have been thinking about how to best let users track their caloric intake and expenditure and the Jane Me folks have presented a neat model. It will be cool to see how their service evolves and I wish them well!

We are happy to finally rollout a page where users can submit issues, suggestions and feature requests. The issues are public and can be voted and commented on. Voting will allow us to better prioritize requests. Additionally, it will provide a way for users to discuss issues or features, further helping craft the site into something people can feel involved in and proud of. The old feedback submission form is still functional, however we advise people to use the new issues page so that managing bug reports and feature requests is more efficient for our team.

Thanks for helping make our site great!

Some users were experiencing issues saving routes. It turns out the issue was with some versions of the Firefox web browser under Windows. Took me a while to hunt down, but it is fixed. We are sorry for the inconvenience this caused some users.

Since our 1.0 release, Ride with GPS has been moving forward rapidly. We have received hundreds of suggestions and have been working hard to address bugs, improve usability, and build out important features. We opened up an application to join our beta program last month, and were pleased to receive several hundred submissions. This program will begin on December 1st, and we will be rolling features out to small groups of users in order to refine our upcoming training features quickly.

We have begun having scheduled releases in order to better handle suggestions, and more accurately let you know when things will be available. This is helping us stay organized and deliver features at predictable times. If you want to see our progress, you can always check out the changelog by clicking on the version at the top of the page. Right now it is 1.0.5, and clicking that will take you to a page that has a detailed list of everything that changes between each version. In this most recent release, most notably we have finally come out with time zone support (edit your settings to change your time zone), and the ability to upload as many TCX/GPX/KML files as you want at once! Just select them all, and see progress bars as they upload. Very easy and pleasant to use.

If you have a Garmin GPS unit though, there is no longer any need to get your data off with 3rd party software! Recently, we have released the Garmin Sync feature which allows you to directly sync your most recent rides from your Garmin GPS unit with our site. We are using this as an opportunity to kick off a series of video tutorials that will walk you through using our site to accomplish various things. If you have any suggestions for videos to make, let us know!

Subscribe to our Youtube channel here: http://www.youtube.com/ridewithgps (or just check out our first video below)

Some of you may have noticed some reliability issues over the last two days. This was due to a package we use in background processing of certain items (your uploaded trips, creating the map images you see around the site) having a couple issues with how we were using it. I am happy to say that after spending 20 or so hours fixing some stuff, things should be much more stable!

If you see any reliability issues, please let us know as usual. A little delay in processing your uploaded file, or before a map image is created is normal, but if you see anything pushing past a few minutes give us an email. Also, re-uploading your TCX/GPX/KML files in this situation will just make duplicates :) You will know we are working on processing your file by the message on your profile page.

We just released a set of bug fixes and minor feature enhancements on top of our new redesign built with our new partner, Cameron Gaut! We have also opened up a form to apply to join our private beta, where you will be able to check out our premium features before they are released, and hopefully help us by providing feedback. By iterating through a couple releases with our beta group before going public with these training and ride analysis features, we will come out of this with our best set of features yet.

Here are the details:

• Ride with GPS Newsletter, Volume 1!
• Apply to take part in our premium features beta test
• Changelog: Get here by clicking the version number at the top of Ride with GPS. It shows all the changes as we release them so you know what’s new.

Lastly, for the social media users out there, you should follow us on twitter here.